


Make Me Feel

by Solovei



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Andy is very distracting, Bisexual Nile Freeman, Discussions of Sexuality and Identity through history, F/F, I'll add more tags later, I'm not tagging Nicky because he's only there for 30 seconds to be cute and gay, Joe and Nile talk about Queerness, Post-Canon, Protective Nile Freeman, Sparring, The smut will come in chapter 3
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:14:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25653466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solovei/pseuds/Solovei
Summary: There's something about Charlize Theron where she a) makes women who are not usually into women wish they WERE into women b) makes me want to ship her with any woman she shares the screen with.Beta byAmiril
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Nile Freeman, Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani
Comments: 16
Kudos: 118





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> There's something about Charlize Theron where she a) makes women who are not usually into women wish they WERE into women b) makes me want to ship her with any woman she shares the screen with.
> 
> Beta by [Amiril](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amiril/)

It hadn’t been really something she thought about growing up. Boys were hot, girls were hot, and Nile assumed everyone felt the same way but didn’t mention it because it was just so obvious. 

Sure, there were a few people at church who yelled something about _Leviticus_ this and _“man shall not lay with man”_ that, but... Nile wasn’t a man so she was pretty sure it didn’t apply to her. And anyway, if God didn’t want her to love humans regardless of what was in their pants, why would he have made them all so gorgeous? 

Mostly she just didn’t have time to date. Between jobs and school and who knows what else, Nile loved the _idea_ of a relationship, but a relationship took time and energy and she had very little of either to spare.

Of course, none of that stopped her from fooling around. 

And then, well— then Nile died, only she didn’t, and she met a very hot woman with what had at one point been called an ‘alternative lifestyle haircut’ and... the rest was history. 

\---

The furniture in the living room had been moved to the side to clear a space. A German textbook lay discarded nearby. Nile kept herself light on her feet, knees bent slightly, fists up. Her gaze was fixed on her opponent, trying to read the movement and intention, to anticipate rather than just react. She managed to deflect a hold, spun it around to try and gain the advantage, but then she happened to see a bit of exposed skin where the shirt had ridden up and—

The punch landed across the side of her face, sending a ringing through Nile’s ear.

“You’re letting yourself get distracted,” said the voice of Andromache the Scythian.

There was a sharp, stinging pain across her cheek, like a cut… and then there wasn’t. Nile resisted the urge to spit out the blood she was still tasting in her mouth. “Shit, come on. We’ve been at this for hours.” 

“And you’re still getting distracted, Nile.” 

It was pretty hard to stay focused on sparring when your opponent was wearing a sleeveless shirt, when those piercing eyes the color of a sheer cliff face were staring right into your soul. 

They were in Norway, somewhere deep in the fjords. The rest of them had settled into a sort of tenuous working relationship with Copley, hadn’t forgiven him for selling out their secret despite how noble his intentions may have been, but Nile had to admit that the standard of living in their safehouses definitely improved since he’d begun working for them. If this was his way of making amends, she would take it. No more abandoned churches in the French suburbs: now they had a cute little Scandinavian cabin straight off someone’s cottagecore moodboard.

“Again.” 

Nile groaned, did a few light jumps in place to shake off the residual pain, and got into her stance once more. 

They circled each other, focusing on mirroring another’s movements, establishing a rhythm. It always began like this. Really, every fight she’s had with Andy has been like this, starting with that first one on the plane. They were testing each other’s boundaries, trying to see how far they could push each other before the other pushed back. 

It was a good metaphor for their relationship the last several months, really. 

Nile thought she saw the opportunity to land her opening strike, but Andy blocked it easily. _Don’t look at her like that_ , she told herself. But of course, it was like every time you try not to think about ice cream on a hot day, you end up doing it even more. Now she couldn’t _stop_ getting distracted, especially not when they’ve sparring for a while and she was frustrated at her inability to progress. Some part of her thought, _fuck it,_ and before Nile could realize what she was saying to the woman who was basically her commanding officer, she heard herself say, “You know, I was thinking… Maybe if I win, I can get something? You know, as a reward.” 

“Like what?” 

Nile was taken aback, not expecting that response. A few different options came to her, from the playful to the downright flirty. She had to think fast. None of them really presented a good way to save face, and she was about to open her mouth to probably blurt out something embarrassing, when thankfully they were interrupted. 

“Boss!” Nicky called out, climbing down the ladder from the upper floor. He held out a simple black flip-phone to Andy. 

“It’s Copley,” he said by way of preamble. “Says he has a job for us. Close by. Smuggling.” He was wearing a knitted off-white sweater, and Nile thought he looked vaguely like an ad for a Christmas romcom. Not her kind of movie, but she could understand the appeal. 

Andy took the phone from him, and the first words out of her mouth were “this better not be like the last smuggling job you gave us.”

Nile couldn't hear Copley’s voice on the other end, but she and Nicky exchanged knowing glances anyway.

Andy listened for a while as Copley presumably laid out the situation for her. Nile lingered nearby, even as she heard Nicky open the sliding glass door out to the porch. Ever since the time she broke them out of the lab, she had fallen into the role of keeping an eye on Andy at any given time. It didn’t really matter to her that nobody had asked her to do it, that Andy probably didn’t want to be guarded, but - she couldn’t help herself. Nile hardly ever left Andy’s side for the last six months. 

“Yes— And if… Hm. We’ll need to get some things. Might be hard in this part of the world— In that case—No, we don’t deal with them, they deal with you—Fine. We’ll have an answer for you within twenty-four hours.” 

Andy flipped the phone closed and hung up. “Nicky!” She called. “We’re going into town.”

“Can I come with?” Nile interjected. 

“Oh, did you master German already?” Andy quipped. It was true, Nile had been having a hard time with the language. She had some Spanish and French, but those romance languages didn’t help her at all when it came to the sentence structure and the strange conjugations German presented. 

Still, Andy put a hand on her shoulder, and Nile felt something like an electric charge run up her spine. “Stay here with Joe. Keep an eye on the place,” the woman said.

And with that, Andromache the Scytian strode away. Through the open porch door, Nile could see Nicky give Joe a quick kiss goodbye before running to start the car. She heard the engine turn over, the sound of doors closing, and finally, the crunch of tires on gravel. 

She remembered Booker’s words in the cave. _Everyone you love will die._ Remembered the high-strung fear she felt when they were trying to escape from Merrick’s lab, that if she took her eyes off of Andy for one moment, she would lose her forever, just like Andy had lost Quynh. Remembered how it seeped into the weeks and months afterward. And now, as she watched that car drive away, it gnawed at her like a hungry animal. 

It was fine. 

It was _fine_ , right?


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> beta by [Amiril](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amiril/) and [redheadandslytherin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/redheadandslytherin/) :) go read their fics, they're so good!!!

The stillness in the house was making her more agitated. Nile felt like she had to do something, anything, get herself busy to work off the nervous energy. She threw on a windbreaker over her hoodie, laced up a pair of running shoes, and headed outside. The porch looked out onto a long wooden staircase, which clung to the side of a steep hill that their cabin was situated on. 

She had never been to Norway before, but so far it seemed a lot like Chicago, if Chicago was somewhere in the mountains, and also if Lake Michigan was actually the Atlantic Ocean. Which was to say, it was cold, the added humidity in the air making it all the more unpleasant. The sun rose late and set early, when it came out from behind the clouds at all. She had been hoping for snow at least, but all they got was rain and wind. 

“Hey, Joe. How’s the view?” Nile called out as she approached the stairs. He was sitting on the top step, notebook in hand, sketching. He wore a plain gray beanie over his dark curls, though it barely contained their volume. On the ground beside him he had set a small ornate box of pencils and other drawing supplies, as well as a metal thermos with what smelled like tea or coffee inside. _Oh,_ she thought, _that must be what Nicky brought out to him earlier._

“Unspoiled, I’d say,” he replied and raised the notebook towards Nile. “At least while we still have daylight.” 

She bent over, hands braced against her knees, to look more closely. The sketch was done in charcoal, bold black lines indicating the rising mountains around them. A winding series of straight lines, the staircase rendered in abstract, framed the drawing and led the viewer’s eye towards the center of the piece, where the water was negative space: a streak of white made brighter by the shadows around it. 

“Oh wow…. That’s… that’s really good.” 

“Mm. I don’t know. It’s missing something,” Joe pondered, holding the notebook up as if to compare it to the real thing. 

She straightened back up, “Well, think it’s great. I’m gonna do a few stair climbs.” 

Joe, clearly absorbed in the composition of his sketch, waved in acknowledgement as he dug around in his pencil box for something, probably a thinner piece of charcoal. Nile smiled as she did a few warm up stretches and then set off, her pace light and brisk. She counted as she climbed down the stairs, finally ending at 200 when she jumped onto the rocky shore at the bottom of the steps. Here, the wind was more noticeable, and the waves were choppy, impatient. She pulled up her hood. 

Then, taking the uphill climb at a faster pace, Nile focused on her breathing. It was good to feel the exertion in her hamstrings and thighs, the burn in her muscles. As she climbed, the tumult of her thoughts was replaced steadily by the awareness of her own body, its interconnected systems and mechanics. She felt something approaching clarity, a particular kind of distance from the thing that drove her out here in the first place. 

Andy. 

The truth of it was, Nile didn’t know where she stood with Andy. Didn’t know how to read her. Didn’t really know what she herself even wanted to begin with. It was one thing to have a casual fling with someone you might see two or three times and then part on good terms, but this… the four of them were constantly around each other. Living together, dying together, fighting together. There was nowhere to go if things got messy. She needed them, and they needed her, and that was that. 

She could spend all day coming up with very good reasons not to do anything about this, but at the end of the day, there was a really, _really_ big part of her that wasn’t interested in listening to good reasons. It wanted to think about Andy, with her leather jackets and her amazing bone structure, Andy with her tendency to come out of the shower wearing only a pair of black boyshort panties and boots. Andy could have her on the floor in less than seconds, and Nile would be left looking up at the muscles in her arms and wondering how she got there. 

Nile did two more climbs up and down. Every time she reached the top, Joe offered her his hand for a high-five, something that was unbelievably lame but she did it anyway before turning around and heading back down. 

Finally, when she felt like she had done enough cardio for the next four weeks, she sat down on the steps beside Joe, catching her breath, legs stretched out in front of her. While she was running, he had put away his notebook and pencils, likely because of the fading daylight. He reached for the thermos. 

Joe actually had very attractive hands, Nile thought as she watched him pour something dark out into a cup and hand it to her. They looked just as nice drawing as they did chopping vegetables for dinner or disemboweling some drug dealer. The rings he wore only accentuated that, and she found watching him to be an interesting distraction from time to time. He and Nicky both were fairly good-looking, but if she had to pick, she’d say Joe was more her type. 

She felt the warmth from the old-fashioned metal cup seep into her cold fingers, and smiled. Joe then poured another cup for himself. 

“Thank you,” she muttered, taking a small sip. Flavors played across her tongue, something aromatic, sharp, but warm; as she swallowed, she could taste a sweetness. “What is this?” 

“Cardamom tea. Nicky got some at the grocer in town last week, and I found honey in the pantry. Not exactly authentic, but it’ll do.” 

For a few moments, they sat together in silence, watching the light disappear beyond the horizon. Something about this felt very familiar to Nile— but in that strange way when traditions get remade in new places and with new people.

“How’s the German coming along?” Joe asked after a few moments of silence. 

“Slowly. I feel like I can’t wrap my head around it,” Nile complained, frowning over her cup of tea.

Joe laughed lightly, “Something else on your mind, maybe?” 

Nile shrugged; he would have to be more specific, there were many things on her mind.

“It’s not hard to see— ” Joe started to explain, turning his gaze away from the sky and back to Nile, “— if you know what to look for. Andromache says you get distracted when you two spar, but I haven’t noticed that when Nicky is teaching you the sword. At least, not to the same degree. You don’t want to leave her alone, and not just because of her… condition. You desire her, don’t you?” 

_God, am I that obvious,_ Nile thought. But there was no use hiding it; secrets didn’t really sit well with anyone after what happened with Booker. “You haven’t said anything to her, have you?” She asked, trying to look away, gripping the cup tighter in her hands.

“It’s not for me to tell,” Joe assured her, sipping his own tea slowly. “I’m not Copley, I don’t trade in other people’s secrets,” he paused, as if trying to remember something, “...well not for a really long time, anyway. But, Nile… the better question is, why haven’t _you_ said anything to her? What’s stopping you?” Joe asked, the rumble of his voice soft even amidst the sound of the waves. 

She sighed and downed the entire cup of tea in one long gulp, feeling the strong flavor overwhelm her throat in a wave of heat. Seeing this, Joe poured some more out for her. Then, Nile turned around and leaned her back against the wooden railing, drawing her knees up against her chest. 

“I don’t know. It’s hard, you know?” Nile tried to explain, holding her tea with both hands. “Used to be you’d just, meet someone at a party or on Tinder, hook up a couple of times, and then go your own way - and that suited me just fine. I was too busy for anything steady.” She glanced at Joe, and he nodded as if to say he understood, so she continued. “But, now, like… _Us_. Our whole thing. Quynh… It’s all really complicated? Like what if she doesn’t like me that way, and then it fucks everything up when we do a mission, and— ” 

Joe leaned back against the railing as well, looking thoughtful, and Nile smiled a bit as she felt his knee push against hers lightly. “Desire is rarely as complicated as all the rules people like to attach to it,” he said. “Do you think she won’t share your feelings?” 

“I mean, I don’t even know if she’s _queer_ or not. Like, she’s got that haircut, but who even knows, man… Does she even like girls? Does she like _anyone_? Besides fucking Auguste Rodin, I guess—Wait what’s so funny?” 

Nile had been so caught up in her line of questioning that she barely noticed Joe starting to chuckle, a sound that only grew until it became full-scale laughter by the time she mentioned the sculptor.

Nile frowned and punched him in the arm as revenge.

“Ow, hey...” Joe protested, “Sorry, it’s— just that word, ‘queer’. It used to mean something… very different not that long ago. We didn’t— I mean, all of us, even Andy. There wasn’t what you would now call a ‘sexual orientation’, I guess? That concept hadn’t come about yet,” he explained.

She blinked, not quite grasping it, “... wasn’t? What do you mean?” 

“People didn’t really connect who they loved with their identity? You might think of yourself as… A Christian, or a Roman, or an Arab, but who you went to bed with, it didn’t… really come into that.”

Nile thought about this for a few moments, turning it over and over in her mind. Joe continued to drink his tea, slowly, clearly savoring the taste even if it was, in his own words, ‘not exactly authentic’. Finally, she asked, “but now, we have… you know, we have things like gay and bi and queer and whatever. So why not use them? For yourself?” 

Joe smirked. He enjoyed a good debate, and he and Nile would often stay up late discussing art symbolism long after Andy and Nicky had gone to bed. “What would it accomplish?”

“Well… you know… to… tell people…” Nile started, but then trailed off toward the end when the argument seemed to fall apart. “I guess, so people know what you are. So you can know who you are and… stuff” 

“Hmmm. And this is what you use it for? Do people know who you are?”

“God, I fucking wish!” Nile exclaimed, laughing in an exasperated sort of way. “Ugh, it’s like—” Nile paused to take another gulp of tea, “I’ve given up telling people because it’s always the same thing. They want you to ‘pick a side’, like I was going kinda steady with Malik my senior year in high school for a bit, but we went to Chicago Pride and everyone was like, ‘wow why are these straight people here’, you know?”

“Sounds shitty,” Joe agreed. “But if I’m following your logic, you won’t tell Andy how you feel until you know for sure that she is interested in women, until you know she considers herself ‘queer’?”

“Not exactly, but… more or less, yeah. I mean, it would be… really bad if I tried to make a move on someone and that person isn’t, like, into what I’ve got in my pants? Or they get offended that someone thought they were something they’re not.”

“Alright, let me put it this way. Say you do tell her. Today, tomorrow, whenever. At that point, there are only two possible outcomes. Either she says yes, or she says no. Now, she could say no for any number of reasons— maybe she’s not into women, as you fear, or maybe she’s not interested in you that way, or maybe she’s just tired and wants to go to bed.”

“Sure, I’m following.”

“But, the end result in that case is the same. She’ll still have said no. So all you can do is ask. Honestly, that’s what… all of us have been doing this entire time, and it’s worked out well. More tea?” 

“Yeah, hit me,” Nile said, holding out her cup.

“But to answer your question— “ Joe poured her the last of what remained in the thermos, and set it aside after finishing his own cup, “I don’t need to explain myself to myself, I’ve had a thousand years to get used to the fact that Allah had decided for my one true love to be a Christian. And, well… You know how we live. I have all the community I need in that cabin. What other people think or assume hasn’t mattered to me for a long time.” 

It was an odd concept to grasp for her at first, but hearing him lay it out like that, Nile had to admit it made sense. They weren’t really normal people anymore. They weren’t going to fit into society anyway, regardless of the words they applied to themselves. Would calling themselves gay, or queer, or anything else, change the love Nicky felt for Joe? The centuries they’d spend together? It wouldn’t, and it could hardly encompass it. Nile got the sense that whatever they had went far beyond simple _want_ and deep into serious soulmate territory. You don’t put words on that. 

She stared at Joe for a few silent seconds, not sure how to follow something like that. “Well, I rest my case. You win.” 

He chuckled, and she could see it in his eyes. “What’s my prize?”

Nile rolled her eyes and smiled at him. “I’ll do the dishes tomorrow.”

“She is as generous as she is wise!” Joe proclaimed, raising a hand as if to the heavens. Then, as if more seriously, he turned back to Nile, “but honestly, listen. Just tell Andy how you feel. And don’t worry about this changing things for the worse - if you think we haven’t all slept with each other once or twice over the centuries—”, he trailed off, as if letting her fill in the rest for herself. 

Almost on cue, Nile saw light out of the corner of her eye, heard the crunch of tires on gravel again, this time in the other direction, getting closer instead of farther away. Joe’s sense of timing really was impeccable.

“Oh, they’re back,” he said, standing up and gathering his thermos, notebook, and art supplies. Joe reached out a hand to help Nile up, and she took it gladly. 

“There’s one way I know she likes you, though,” Joe said, just as the car was pulling up the driveway.

“What’s that?”

“She smiles when she beats you in a fight.” 

She gave him a friendly punch again, and he slung his free arm over her shoulders, and thus they walked towards the car. 

“Hope you guys brought food,” Nile called out. 

“Yeah, keeping watch is _exhausting_. Nicky, did you bring gelato?” Joe echoed. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow I really am making y'all wait for this aren't I? But honestly, given the source material, I feel like it's warranted to take your time and really examine the implications of how people relate to each other. I wanted this to feel as grounded as the movie.  
> The gelato line is a reference to [this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25337044) \- for some reason I could not get over the concept, so I had to put it as a finisher.
> 
> Next chapter: THE PORN, finally.


End file.
